Joel Rosenberg - The Twelfth Imam

Charlie came back around the corner as Claire turned to the sink again, pulled her hair into a ponytail to keep it out of her eyes, and continued washing their matching maroon U.S. Embassy in Tehran coffee mugs.

He turned her around sharply and put his hand over her mouth. “We are leaving now,” he said as quietly as he could but with an intensity he knew Claire had never heard before. “Don’t you get it, Claire? Khomeini’s thugs have the entire embassy. They have the vaults. They have the files. They know who I am, and they’re going to want information I can give them. Right now they’re taking a roll call of every employee. When they find we’re missing, they’re going to look up our address. If it’s been destroyed, they’re going to put a gun to the head of Liz Swift. If she doesn’t give us up, they’re going to kill her in front of everyone else. Then they’re going to ask Mike Metrinko. If he doesn’t give us up, they’re going to kill him. Then they’re going to turn to John Limbert. And they’re going to keep killing people until someone breaks. I don’t know who it will be. But someone’s going to give them our address, and then they’re coming for us. And what do you think is going to happen next, Claire? Do you think they’re going to torture me?”

Terrified, Claire shrugged, her big brown eyes filling rapidly with tears.

“They’re not. I’m a six-foot-two, hundred-and-seventy-pound, former all-American point guard who speaks Farsi and has a Colt.45 on the kitchen table. No, they’re not going to torture me. They’re going to torture you, my love,” he said, “until I start talking… And if they find out you’re pregnant…”

Claire was trembling.

“I would never let it get to that point,” Charlie assured her, his own eyes welling up with tears. “I couldn’t. I’d tell them everything. But honestly, I fear they’d still torture you anyway. That’s who we’re dealing with. I’m sorry, sweetheart. But there’s no way this ends well. Unless we leave-right now.”

He paused a moment, then let go of her mouth and wiped his eyes.

Claire immediately grabbed him and held him tightly. After a moment she stepped back and looked intently at her husband. She had been trembling, but now she seemed calm. “Ten minutes?” she asked.

Charlie nodded.

“I’ll be ready,” she promised.

Ten minutes later, Charlie eased their black Buick Skylark onto Ferdowsi Avenue, dubbed “Embassy Row” by local diplomats.

Were other Western missions under siege, he wondered, or just his own?

The boulevard was as congested as ever, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. No protests. No demonstrations. No presidents or prime ministers being burned in effigy here, even though hideous mock-ups of President Carter were being torched just a few blocks away. It was odd. They were so close to the student mob, but here he could detect no hostilities of any kind. Still, Charlie could tell Claire was getting anxious. If they were going to get out of this city, they needed to do it quickly.

“Where will we go?” she asked her husband.

“I’m not sure,” Charlie conceded. “Even if we could make it to the airport, they’d never let us out of the country. Especially not with U.S. diplomatic passports.”

“How about Turkey?” Claire asked hopefully.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “The nearest border is hundreds of miles away. And again, even if we could get that far without being detected, the military would never let us pass.”

“Well, we can’t just hover here, Charlie. It’s too dangerous.”

“I know,” he said. “I just had to see…”

There was no point finishing his sentence. Claire knew as well as he did that he hadn’t really needed to come to Embassy Row. The Iranians weren’t angry at the rest of the Western powers. The British hadn’t welcomed the despised Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into their country, even if it was “just” for medical treatment of an old man on his deathbed. Nor had the Turks or the Germans. Only the U.S. government had done that. Was it worth it?

“Turn here,” Claire said without warning.

Charlie took the advice and made a hard right on Kushk e-Mesri. He maneuvered the roomy four-door sedan down the narrow side street, knowing she was trying to get them off a major thoroughfare, where they ran a much higher risk of being spotted by uniformed police or plainclothes intelligence agents. But what she’d just done instead was head them straight into the campus of Tehran Technical School. It was an innocent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

Another hotbed of radicalism in the capital, the campus and its adjacent streets were jammed with students. Just finished with their midday prayers, they were now chanting and marching. Some were firing machine guns into the air. Charlie could feel the same violent spirit that had pervaded the scene around the embassy, and he immediately slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. Jamming the car into reverse, he gunned the engine and began to back up but was cut off by a VW van filled with students that had come up behind them. The VW’s driver suddenly began screaming something about their American car, and six young men jumped out, carrying wooden sticks and metal pipes.

“Lock your doors, Claire,” Charlie ordered, doing the same on his side.

Wild-eyed, the students surrounded the Buick, taunting and cursing them.

“Charlie, do something,” Claire said, clutching her purse with her passport and valuables to her chest.

The students began rocking the car from side to side, trying to overturn it, but it was too heavy.

“Charlie, for heaven’s sake, do something!”

“Like what?” he shouted back, genuine fear in his voice. “If I drive this car forward or back, I’ll run over someone. Is that what you want?”

A young woman-no more than seventeen or eighteen-was pouring something all over their car.

“Of course not,” Claire said. “I’m just saying…”

Charlie smelled gasoline. He knew what was coming next.

At that moment, Claire cried out, doubled over, and grabbed her abdomen.

“Honey, what is it?” Charlie asked.

Claire didn’t look up. She was screaming in pain.

Just then one of the students took a steel pipe and smashed the passenger-side window. Glass flew everywhere. Blood streaked down Claire’s face. Then the student grabbed her and tried to pull her out of the car. Claire, tangled in her seat belt, screamed louder.

Charlie was screaming too. He grabbed Claire’s arm, the one closest to him, and tried to pull her back into the car. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the young woman who had poured the gasoline light a match and toss it onto the now-soaked hood. Suddenly the car was engulfed in flames.

The heat was unbearable. Charlie feared the Buick’s full tank could explode at any moment. Seeing his briefcase on the floor by Claire’s feet, he reached for it, ripped it open, and pulled out the pistol.

He saw another student heave a brick through their back window. More flying glass filled the car.

Charlie pivoted, took aim, and fired at the attacker, dropping him with a single shot. Then he turned back to the student mauling his wife and double-tapped him to the head.

Three shots in three seconds-the crowd began to scatter. But the gasoline-fed flames had now reached the rear of the Skylark and were already consuming the backseat. Charlie knew he was out of time. He threw open the driver’s-side door, jumped out, moved quickly to the passenger side, and pulled his wife’s limp body out of the flames and laid her down on the sidewalk as far from the burning car as he could. She was covered in blood. It wasn’t just the cuts to her face. Something else was terribly wrong.